Behind The Scenes: Up close and personal with ‘Lose Your Mind.’
When you’re standing in the midst of a festival, going crazy in the middle of the crowd, one of the last things that would come to your mind is the process behind actually creating your own party. Time, money, effort and an endless supply of creativity are just a few things that are required when putting on a legendary bash and really, there’s so much more than meets the eye. In The Netherlands, with more than two festivals on per weekend, the festival and party industry can be quite competitive and making your party successful takes a lot more than simply booking the hottest artists. One particular organisation that has boomed rapidly over the past few years is Lose Your Mind. These guys are behind some of the most infamous parties such as CRAFT Festival, De Tijdmachine, Reckless and World Of Hardcore. We were given the amazing opportunity to take a look behind the scenes have a chat with one of the working cogs behind Lose Your Mind, Jeroen about what it’s like to organise events, book artists and more!
1. Hi Jeroen, thanks for chatting with me. First of all, what have you been up to today (work-wise)?
Hi! It’s nice to finally do an interview with Alive at Night 🙂 I really love the way this platform looks in the scene nowadays and I love you have the guts to say what you think. At this moment I’m very busy with some major projects, mainly doing some last minute organising for CRAFT Festival 2015.
2. So you are the man behind ‘Lose Your Mind’ and you organise all kinds of hard dance events. Can you tell me a little bit more about ‘Lose Your Mind’ and some of its concepts?
Lose Your Mind is our way of looking at the hardstyle scene. We have a several different concepts with different sounds and every concept has his own identity and its own fans. For example, if you like the most popular hardstyle you can go to Penoze, for the real raw hardstyle we have Reckless, the roots of hardstyle from 2005-2011 is at De Tijdmachine and the more euphoric side of hardstyle is at Access. We also have World of Hardcore (Hardcore) and Ouwe Jongens Krentenbrood (Hardstyle 2000-2004).
3. How did ‘Lose Your Mind’ come about?
I’ve been a hardstyle lover since day 1 and visited all the famous Qlubtempo party’s back in the days and I always wanted to mix that love with my other love; the underworld. After graduating from the film academy, I wanted to do something with my film idea ‘Penoze’ and wanted to combine these forces with one event. Adaro (Thijs) also shares this same passion for the ‘underworld’ as me actually which is really cool.
4. How many events you are organising/have organised in 2015?
In 2015 Lose Your Mind kicked off with a big bang after organising the ‘Art of War’ event with Warface on the 3rd of January, this signified the beginning of a big year. We’ve organised ‘World of Hardcore’ and ‘Reckless’ in the KDanz, Schagen and now we have our full focus on ‘CRAFT Festival’ 2015. We’ll also do a festival hosting in August and organize some other events in the KDanz, Schagen later this year. Of course we’ll come back to Amsterdam for De Tijdmachine in December and you’ll hear more about that event in the following months.
**Lose Your Mind kicked off the year with style with their ‘Art Of War’ party.**
5. Can you tell me about the process that you go through when organising events?
Everything starts with an idea and a brainstorming session with the team. After searching for the best date and location we can decide which artists we want to invite for this event. Making the line up is one of the parts that takes the most of the time. It’s important to impress the Lose Your Mind followers with fresh and creative events. At the same time we work hard to get a decent promotion agenda and then we start promoting it online. After that, it’s up to our followers to decide if they come or not!
6. CRAFT is the biggest events that you organise – can you tell me a little bit more about both last year’s edition in comparison to this years?
CRAFT Festival 2014 was one of the highlights in the history of Lose Your Mind and we worked really hard to get this festival up and running, however we could have done a few things better. Saying that, this leads us to give this year’s edition a high priority. We have grown this year with visitors, artists and stages and also with our team. We’ve multiplied the numbers of team members who all have their own specialty. In 2015 we want to bring CRAFT Festival to a higher level!
7. You also organised De Tijdmachine (The Timemachine) – how is it important for you to organise events that honour the roots of hardstyle?
Lose Your Mind started to organise events with these sounds and we know that a lot of the artists love playing this music at De Tijdmachine. Together with our loyal followers we want to bring back the good old days and a lot of great memories. We think that it’s important that you will never forget where you came from but we do this also for our own pleasure. Like many hardstyle fans, we also love this golden time in the history of hardstyle.
** De Tijdmachine – the infamous night where Bioweapon reunited**
8. What does an average day look like for you in the office?
Most of the time it’s running late for meetings, meetings and.. meetings! We have an office in a great spot in Amsterdam and the team is more a group of friends, so being at the office feels like home. There is always someone doing their thing or we’re all playing FIFA15 together in our down time.
9. What are the biggest obstacles that you face when organising parties and their concepts?
We won’t think about obstacles. There is always a solution for every problem 🙂
10. When choosing line-ups for events, what kind of artists do you look for?
We’re always looking for the newest names that can be the upcoming headliners, it’s good to support young guys and keep the scene alive. At this moment, the whole raw hype is at his highest point and for us it’s now the time to search for a new sound. We hope that the more euphoric sound is coming back to the floor because the majority of the raw sounds we hear have already been done before. We would rather have the next Atmozfears or Code Black rather than the 1827th carbon copy of Warface or Radical Redemption.
11. What is the most exciting thing about your job?
Working with your creativity gives you the opportunity to do the things you really love the most and work with some genius people, but most of the fun comes out of the fact that no two days are the same.
12. What are some of the main skills that you need to run an event planning organisation?
When you want to work in this business you have to have experience with all of the things that can be done within the field. You need to know how it is to work as a bartender, but also as a stage builder and also doing the artist handling. At that point you have enough knowledge that you can think in their shoes and it gives you a good feel for how things should be done.
13. Where do you see ‘Lose Your Mind’ in five years time?
We hope to become a steady player in the festival field and become the leading name in the search for new hardstyle event concepts.
14. In your opinion, why do you feel that Lose Your Mind has become an already successful company in such a short amount of time?
We knew the ideas where good, the artists supported us from day one and the other organisations gave us the space to do what we wanted to do. We do everything with passion and communicate open and directly with our fan-base. I think the respect that we have already earned has sped up the growth of Lose Your Mind.
15. You cover a range of different styles of hard dance music within your events – do you feel that as an event company, it’s important to cover the whole spectrum of hard dance music? (hardcore, old-school, raw hardstyle, hardstyle)
Covering the entire spectrum is not that important, as long as you are doing things with passion then that’s all that matters. These styles that we cover are styles of music that we are passionate about. This is what keeps us going and for that reason there are some styles that we won’t program on our events.
16. Finally running a business can be tough work and breakfast is certainly the most important meal of the day! What did you eat for breakfast today?
I like to live healthy, so I started with a bag of Nibb-it Sticks.
Thanks so much for chatting with me Jeroen, we wish Lose Your Mind the very best with the upcoming CRAFT Festival and all of the events this year, we really can’t wait to see what other new concepts you guys will come up with in the future! For all partygoers, CRAFT Festival tickets are running fast, so you better secure your spot on the dancefloor today! CRAFT TICKETS